It went like this: Make sure the tablets get taken. Be patient. Be nice. Shop. Help with dinner. And in a few weeks things should improve, recalibrate. She was so used to the annual slump, she was almost taking it in stride, even though this year wasn’t shaping up as the big improvement she’d hoped for. They’d had a wobbly start, but having a proper diagnosis and a plan meant there was hope on the horizon. And her mother was sticking with the group therapy, still going, ten weeks in, a big win.
“What did you talk about tonight?”
“Things you children don’t need to know.”
“Like what?”
“I gave them my bánh chưng recipe.” She shrugged. “They know mine’s the best. Some of them just buy it.”
Vân Ước knew when she was being diverted with talk of New Year’s rice cake recipes, but she didn’t mind tonight. Her mother seemed in slightly better spirits.
“Brush your hair, Mama?”
Her mother nodded, and sat down on a kitchen chair. Vân Ước went into her parents’ bedroom, breathing in its mingled slightly peppery and warm camphor smell, the ever-present ghosts of her mother’s perfume and the Tiger Balm ointment her father rubbed into his finger joints to soothe the aching, and got the hairbrush.
She paused at the wardrobe mirror. When she was very little, two people used to stand beside her reflection in the mirror: a boy and an old lady. They felt like a benign presence. She’d never told anyone about them, not even Jess, and she stopped seeing them when she was still young, about four—before she started school, anyway. For a while she had pushed her face into the mirror, trying to see them somewhere, at the most distant angle, deep in the speckled reflection, but they never showed themselves again. Now they felt like something she must surely have imagined, though part of her still believed in them.
She stood behind her mother’s chair and brushed her hair gently for about five minutes, drawing the brush smoothly from forehead to nape, over and over, in the way her mother liked. It was the only sustained physical contact she seemed to enjoy. Her usual mode of a kiss good-bye, for instance, was the kiss-and-push-on-your-way. She wasn’t a snuggler. No surprise, really, that this acceptable affection came via a prickly implement.
An envelope with the school crest on it was on the bench. Already opened. That meant Jess’s mum must have been in today. Her English wasn’t as bad as Vân Ước’s mother’s, and she sometimes read a letter for her if Vân Ước wasn’t around.
“What’s the note from school?”
“A night meeting for information about art. Next week.”
“Oh, right. You don’t have to go to those things. I can pass on anything important.”
“This one your ba wants to go to. We want to make sure there’s no more art for next year. It wastes so much of your time. You need to study only sciences and math for medicine. Everyone knows that.”
Vân Ước took a calming breath. Whatever happened she had to be allowed to continue with her art. Unfortunately, this early in the term, it wasn’t too late for her to change subjects if her parents made a big enough fuss and the school listened. If her parents, for instance, told the school that Vân Ước had implied that art was just for this year alone, and not a two-year course, which it was, she could be in trouble.
An even worse scenario would be if her parents went to the information night and met Ms. Halabi and she gave them the big encouragement-talk about how Vân Ước’s portfolio plans looked good, and she could be confident about aiming for art school—something that normal parents might be thrilled to hear.
“They don’t expect scholarship parents to attend, Ma. And they don’t like scholarship parents telling them what they should do. I told you: They want us to take a wide range of subjects. Not just science. That’s what IB is all about. If you complain about art, they will think you don’t understand the IB.”
Ack. She felt awful pulling the scholarship parents line. She’d used it before. She kind of relied on it.
She knew it was cheating to soothe her conscience with the fact that her mother didn’t need any extra stress just now, but she always came to a dead end when she imagined how to breach the gap between her parents’ land of study hard, make money, be eternally secure, and her dream destination: artist, probable low income, no security. So, for now she had to keep a handle on the information flow.
When her father returned home after his game of cards, and her mother was safely in bed, Vân Ước decided, again, to try to find out some “things you children don’t need to know.”
“Ba, we read at school that Vietnamese refugees from when you and Mama came over were mostly ‘economic’ refugees. Is that right?” Not strictly a lie, because she had read it in the school library, but a mention of school in the question might mean her father would be more willing to talk.
Her father looked at her for the longest time, as though deciding whether to talk, what to say.
“If they mean the war was over, that’s right,” he began. “But things were very bad. Your grandfather had served in the army; he was in a reeducation camp. Everything we owned was confiscated. I was put in jail for no reason, for being ‘a person of suspicion.’ We had no future there. No life at all. But, yes, I suppose if they say it, we were economic refugees.” He shrugged. “The communists certainly took away any chance of making a living.”
“Can I ask you about how you got out? The boat trip?”
“Is this also for school?” He was obviously becoming impatient, and she took her cue to back off.
“No, ba, just me wanting to know.”
“We made it. We got here. Now don’t go upsetting Mama with your questions. She’s told you she doesn’t like to speak about it.”
“But why?”
“It was hard for her. Now no more questions! Time for some study, or sleep.”